Picasa 3.5 gains face recognition, Google Maps integration

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 23 September 2009 08:04

IT Industry - Development

A new version of Google's Picasa photo editing and management application includes face recognition. Other new features include Google Maps integration for geotagging.

Face recognition is nothing new in consumer photo tools. Polar Rose has been doing it online for years, and Google added the feature to Picasa Web Albums last September. One example of a desktop application with this feature is Apple's iPhoto 09.

And now name tagging through face recognition is one of the highlights of Picasa 3.5, available for Windows and Mac OS X.

The program does an initial pass to pick out the faces in the existing collection of photos, and gives the user a chance to put a name to each set of matching faces. When new photos seem to match known faces, Picasa tentatively identifies the individuals.

Name tags can be exchanged between Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. If you think it's a bit creepy to provide a third party with the names of people in your photos, Picasa provides a setting that keeps the tags on your computer.

On the other hand, if you've already added name tags to your Picasa Web Album, they can be downloaded to the desktop implementation.

Other changes in Picasa 3.5 include the use of Google Maps for geotagging (as an alternative to, not a replacement for, Google Earth), streamlined importing (with selective uploading as part of the process) and quick tagging.

Picasa 3.5 for Mac is "almost" feature-complete compared with the Windows version according to Todd Bogdan, a Google software engineer. For that reason, it is no longer considered a beta product.

Picasa 3.5 can be downloaded via this page at Google's site.